Applications Area Advisor:

Mailing Lists:

Description of Working Group:

There is currently no universal standard for printing. Several
protocols are in use, but each has limited applicability and none can
be considered the prevalent one. This means that printer vendors have
to implement and support a number of different protocols and protocol
variants. There is a need to define a protocol which can cover the
most common situations for printing on the Internet.

The goal of this working group is to develop requirements for Internet
Printing and to describe a model and semantics for Internet Printing.

The further goal is to define a new application level Internet Printing
Protocol for the following core functions:

- for a user to find out about a printer's capabilities
- for a user to submit print jobs to a printer
- for a user to find out the status of a printer or a print job
- for a user to cancel a previously submitted job

The Internet Print Protocol is a client-server type protocol which
should allow the server side to be either a separate print server or a
printer with embedded networking capabilities. The focus of this effort
is optimized for printers, but might be applied to other output
devices. These are outside the scope of this working group.

The working group will also define a set of directory attributes that
can be used to ease finding printers on the network.

The Internet Print Protocol will include mechanisms to ensure adequate
security protection for materials to be printed, including at a minimum
mechanisms for mutual authentication of client and server and
mechanisms to protect the confidentiality of communications between
client and server.

Finally, the IPP working group will produce recommendations for
interoperation of LPR clients with IPP servers, and IPP clients with
LPR servers. These recommendations will include instructions for both
the translation of the LPR protocol onto IPP and the translation of the
IPP protocol onto LPR. However, there is no expectation to provide new
IPP features to LPR clients, nor is there an explicit requirement to
translate LPR extensions to IPP, beyond those features available in the
4.2BSD UNIX implementation of LPR, and which are still useful today.

Other capabilities that will be examined for future versions include:

- security features for authentication, authorization, and policies
- notifications from the server to the client
- accounting

Subjects currently out of scope for this working group are:

- protection of intellectual property rights
- fax input
- scanning

The working group shall strive to coordinate its activities with other
printing-related standards bodies, without the need to be strictly
bound by their standards definitions. These groups are: